Commentary on comics, games, books, and their occasional intersection with politics and other serious business.

Thursday, April 07, 2016

17 to 01: And the Children Shall Lead

We end up arguing D&D stats on this episode, ad infinitum because there's so little else to cover here.We talk a little evil, but the episode falls far short of demonstrating any actual evil. It's disappointing.Follow-up: The other Celene Dion song is "It's All Coming Back." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDxoj-tDDIU

3 comments:

Oh! It *is* Children of the Corn in space. I should probably watch Children of the Corn. (And Dream Catcher, I guess?) I wonder how many eps are based on existing stories vs eps not based on anything else... I bet that one Enterprise ep where there's three crew trapped in The Cave of Paranoid Hallucination was written as a "fixed" version of this TOS ep. Maybe the TNG de-evolution ep, too.

Not only are they not wafting, but there could be PLAGUE here or something. They have no sense of quarantine procedures. Maybe that's why they bury them instead of taking them onboard? (Phasers can dig graves quick, right?) And seeing that UFP banner, I suddenly realize that I don't know what the custom is for posting flags in modern day USA cemeteries, let alone ad hoc burials overseas in the '60s. Maybe it's in the scene purely so the kids have something to knock over.

Without actually opining on the "what qualifies as a colony" and "mass suicide" thing, I agree that the ep seems to have an issue with scale. Gorgan says something later about recruiting a % of Marcus' population, which might imply *this* colony could have had hundreds or thousands of people... I wonder, if they'd been able to hire enough extras, would they have written the colony as thousands or millions? Would there still be so few surviving kids (and would they have made the dead kids a plot point), or would they have put enough kids on the ship to outnumber the crew? With extra kids they might've been able to lean less on the goofy mind-control bit, but it would have been harder to sway a critical mass of kids away from the Gorgan.

Kids: awwwww, this wasteland is way more fun than boarding a starshipLater: this starship is way more fun than that boring awful wasteland

...how would they make the children look like they're starving? Rely on child-acting to convey it? Cast hungry-looking kids? (I bet the ice cream scene is mostly there to keep the child-actors happy.)

Yeah, the plot is pretty thin, and it's another one where you really have to question StarFleet procedure. -Kirk never restricts the kids to certain parts of the ship, he only orders them watched-"I wanted to warn the Federation to keep ships away, so I sent a distress signal!"-Spock made no attempt to recover the two lost crewmen-The kids have no reason to summon Gorgan that second time! At least it makes sense they'd have a recording of what the kids did on the bridge, since that was established back in Court Martial.

I like the Blood Spirits and I get why they didn't have a totem, but yeah. A fungus that drives two or three different species to act in certain way to collectively spread the fungus would be a pretty cool totem.

And to be honest, those child actors were pretty professional. It was surprising to read about.